Have you come across features in programs such as MS Excel that you have never used and you believe you will never use? Have you come across features and apps loaded in your phone that you have not never opened?
Have you ever filled basic details about yourself at two or three places while entering an office building? In manufacturing, have you come across the undersides of products painted / polished, or equipment features that perhaps nobody uses?
In hospitals, we often deal with receptionists and nurses first, who ask us to complete certain tests before setting the appointment date with the doctor. And when we return after a couple of days to meet the doctor, we are handed the folder containing the reports, but the doctor does not seem to look at some of the reports!
Such features and processes represent opportunities for competitors to snatch business. For society, they represent wasted materials and effort. Obviously, they need to be minimised.
But this is often less of a waste as we would normally understand the word, and more about re-thinking materials and processes in the light of greater experience and newer technologies. After all, someone must have applied their minds while creating and providing those amazing features in MS Excel, while prescribing those medical reports, etc.!
The need for relentlessness
The capability question is, does the function question and improve its processes periodically, or does it slavishly adhere to some received wisdom of the past? It should be able to improve its methods by questioning itself. The objective being to reduce work, or material / energy consumption, or both.
At this juncture of technological development, there is a massive opportunity to reduce this sort of waste using digitalisation. Nearly all internal processes can be significantly whittled down and smoothened using such technologies. Employees should normally not enter any customer data, they should be entered by the customers themselves, and even they should need to input the data only once. Going further, intelligent client-side software should be used so that they too don’t need to type in the same sorts of information again and again across all sorts of forms, forms should auto-populate themselves.
The virus-driven lockdowns have suddenly made us conscious of the superfluity of turning up in offices at fixed times, unthinkingly. It has suddenly opened our eyes to the possibility of working seamlessly with people near and far. It suddenly seems entirely possible to collaborate seamlessly with people several time zones away, as if they are in the office across town that one can go to, if one wishes. This has opened us up to the possibility to reduce the enormous waste of travelling and commuting.
This is a powerful capability. This is how legacy businesses can reinvent themselves before start-ups disrupt them. Look at how Philips has transformed its Lighting business all by itself, now that lighting costs have collapsed due to the coming of LEDs. There has been no disruption in the lighting business, in the manner in which Tesla has muscled into the automotive arena on the back of battery-powered cars.
Taken to the logical extreme, this can mean what Hammer and Champy had called Business Process Re-Engineering in the early 1990’s. However, firstly, when mapping Functional Capability, we are not trying to cast the future capabilities of the function. And secondly, later, when casting future capabilities as a downstream process, by definition, such business transformation capabilities cannot reside inside any single function.
At this juncture of technological development, there is a massive opportunity to reduce this sort of waste using digitalisation.
In the context of deep manufacturing systems, this sort of waste is typically held separate from wastes such as unnecessary transportation or unnecessary physical movement of operators. However, in a more general context, these three types of waste can be seen as one category.
While interviewing role incumbents to draw up the Current Functional Capabilities, we only check whether there have been process improvements implemented in recent times, and how those improvements were proposed, deliberated upon, finalised and implemented.
Related Readings :
POWER B. When Is Process Improvement Strategically Important, HBR, Operations ( Oct 2010 )
BERKOWSKI S. Why Process Improvement Is Key To Your Organizations Success, CMS WiRE ( Oct 2018 )
